The Hacker News — Cyber Security, Hacking, Technology News

Oracle has released a security patch update to address a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability that affects its MICROS point-of-sale (POS) business solutions for the hospitality industry.

The fix has been released as part of Oracle's January 2018 update that patches a total of 238 security vulnerabilities in its various products.

According to public disclosure by ERPScan, the security firm which discovered and reported this issue to the company, Oracle's MICROS EGateway Application Service, deployed by over 300,000 small retailers and business worldwide, is vulnerable to directory traversal attack.

If exploited, the vulnerability (CVE-2018-2636) could allow attackers to read sensitive data and receive information about various services from vulnerable MICROS workstations without any authentication.

Using directory traversal flaw, an unauthorized insider with access to the vulnerable application could read sensitive files from the MICROS workstation, including service logs and configuration files.

As explained by the researchers, two such sensitive files stored within the application storage—SimphonyInstall.xml or Dbconfix.xml—contain usernames and encrypted passwords for connecting to the database.

"So, the attacker can snatch DB usernames and password hashes, brute them and gain full access to the DB with all business data. There are several ways of its exploitation, leading to the whole MICROS system compromise," the researchers warned.

"If you believe that gaining access to POS URL is a snap, bear in mind that hackers can find digital scales or other devices that use RJ45, connect it to Raspberry PI, and scan the internal network. That is where they easily discover a POS system. Remember this fact when you pop into a store."

ERPScan has also released a proof-of-concept Python-based exploit, which, if executed on a vulnerable MICROS server, would send a malicious request to get the content of sensitive files in response.